Axel Vervoordt’s home in Venice.
If this was your Venetian palazzo, you’d probably have assistants to help you open up for the summer and flip the closets from cold to warm weather clothing. And they would definitely have laundered all those slipcovers.
Early June is when I, on a much smaller scale, ease myself and my home into summer, swapping out everything black or grey for a more seasonally appropriate white. Here is an admittedly incomplete list of some things you can get in anticipation of the season.
Left unbuttoned as a beach coverup to throw over a bathing suit or dressed up with proper jewelry or worn casually with slides and a raffia clutch (I could go on and on), this white linen summer dress, COS.com, $150 CAN is a summer staple. And it has pockets!
Put away your heavy cotton towels and switch to lightweight linen waffle towels from Flax Home for summer. In bright white in sizes from hand- to enormous bath sheet ($38-$88) they brighten a bathroom and are much more practical than cotton. Linen is highly absorbent and dries quickly so even when it’s humid and the air is heavy, you never have to suffer the olfactory assault of damp, moldy-smelling towels (the smell of freshman dorm rooms.)
I have succumbed to the ugly shoe trend because these Oofos OOAHH slides, $74, oofos.ca, are just so comfortable (at least three of my girlfriends have this model.) They provide the arch support busted feet need and are pleasingly squishy and shock-absorbing when your foot hits the pavement. Important note: it’s critical when wearing a biomorphically blobby-looking shoe to have an immaculate pedicure. No exceptions. Ergo, this beautiful Essie colour for summery toes (below.)
Essie’s new Boatloads of Love nail polish, $11.99, Shoppers Drug Mart, is an opaque soft white with the faintest blue shimmer and just enough creamy pink that you don’t look like you painted your nails with Liquid Paper™ (There’s an ancient schoolroom reference.) It’s crisp, chic, very summery and very wearable.
Look at your bathroom with a dispassionate eye and you’ll see that in addition to replacing towels, it’s also time to clear out all the nearly-empty shampoo bottles littering the shower. Replace them with an eco-friendly, refillable, recycled-aluminum bottle of Kérastase Nutritive from their new Kérastase refillable line. (Of course I chose the white one, but Nutritive for ‘sensitized’ damaged hair is perfect for summer.) The initial purchase of a bottle with a 500 ml pouch of shampoo (twice the amount of product in a regular 250 ml. bottle) is $80, kerastase.ca and salons, and each subsequent 500 ml refill is $72.
It’s a happy day for anyone wanting a more elegant olfactory experience when cleaning the house as Diptyque has entered the home care space with their new La Droguerie line of eco-friendly household care products. There’s dish soap, leather and wood lotion, multi-surface cleaner and these white porcelain medallions ($61 CAN, Holt Renfrew) impregnated with cedar oil to hang in the closet or slide into a drawer to protect your woollens from being munched by evil moths over the summer.